Hello Locals members:

I wanted to make sure you are updated on what I regard as the exciting changes we announced on Friday night’s program, as well as the status of your current membership.

As most of you likely know, we announced on our Friday night show that that SYSTEM UPDATE episode would be the last one under the show’s current format (if you would like to watch it, you can do so here). As I explained when announcing these changes, producing and hosting a nightly video-based show has been exhilarating and fulfilling, but it also at times has been a bit draining and, most importantly, an impediment to doing other types of work that have always formed the core of my journalism: namely, longer-form written articles and deep investigations.

We have produced three full years of SYSTEM UPDATE episodes on Rumble (our premiere show was December 10, 2022). And while we will continue to produce video content similar to the kinds of segments that composed the show, they won’t be airing live every night at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, but instead will be posted periodically throughout the week (as we have been doing over the last couple of months both on Rumble and on our YouTube channel here).

To enlarge the scope of my work, I am returning to Substack as the central hub for my journalism, which is where I was prior to launching SYSTEM UPDATE on Rumble. In addition to long-form articles, Substack enables a wide array of community-based features, including shorter-form written items that can be posted throughout the day to stimulate conversation among members, a page for guest writers, and new podcast and video features. You can find our redesigned Substack here; it is launching with new content on Monday.

For our current Locals subscribers, you can continue to stay at Locals or move to Substack, whichever you prefer. For any video content and long-form articles that we publish for paying Substack members, we will cross-post them here on Locals (for members only), meaning that your Locals subscription will continue to give you full access to our journalism. 

When I was last at Substack, we published some articles without a paywall in order to ensure the widest possible reach. My expectation is that we will do something similar, though there will be a substantial amount of exclusive content solely for our subscribers. 

We are working on other options to convert your Locals membership into a Substack membership, depending on your preference. But either way, your Locals membership will continue to provide full access to the articles and videos we will publish on both platforms.

Although I will miss producing SYSTEM UPDATE on a (more or less) nightly basis, I really believe that these changes will enable the expansion of my journalism, both in terms of quality and reach. We are very grateful to our Locals members who have played such a vital role over the last three years in supporting our work, and we hope to continue to provide you with true independent journalism into the future.

— Glenn Greenwald   

[Note: The article was originally published in Portuguese in Folha de. S.Paulo, on January 5, 2026]

The United States, over the past 50 years, has fought more wars than any other country by far. In order to sell that many wars to its population and the world, one must deploy potent war propaganda, and the U.S. undoubtedly possess that.

Large parts of both the American and Western media are now convinced that the latest U.S. bombings and regime-change operation is to “liberate” the Venezuelan people from a repressive dictator. The claim that liberation is the American motive – either in Venezuela or anywhere else – is laughable. 

The U.S. did not bomb and invade Venezuela in order to “liberate” the country. It did so to dominate the country and exploit its resources. If one can credit President Donald Trump for anything when it comes to Venezuela, it is his candor about the American goal.  

When asked about U.S. interests in Venezuela, Trump did not bother with the pretense of freedom or democracy. “We're going to have to have big investments by the oil companies,” Trump said. “And the oil companies are ready to go."

This is why Trump has no interest in empowering Venezuela’s opposition leaders, whether it be Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado (who Trump dismissed as a “nice woman” incapable of governing) or the declared winner of the country’s last election Edmundo Gonzalez, in whom Trump has no interest. Trump instead said he prefers that Maduro’s handpicked Vice President, the hard-line socialist Decly Rodriquez, remain in power. 

Note that Trump is not demanding that Rodriguez give Venezuelans more freedom and democracy. Instead, Trump said, the only thing he demands of her is “total access. We need access to the oil and other things.”

The U.S. government in general does not oppose dictatorships, nor does it seek to bring freedom and democracy to the world’s repressed peoples. The opposite is true.

Installing and supporting dictatorships around the world has been a staple of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. The U.S. has helped overthrow far more democratically elected governments than it has worked to remove dictatorships.

Indeed, American foreign policy leaders often prefer pro-American dictatorships. Especially in regions where anti-American sentiments prevail – and there are more and more regions where that is now the case – the U.S. far prefers autocrats that repress and crush the preferences of the population, rather than democratic governments that must placate and adhere to public sentiments.

The only requirement that the U.S. imposes on foreign leaders is deference to American dictators. Maduro’s sin was not autocracy; it was disobedience.

That is why many of America’s closest allies – and the regimes Trump most loves and supports – are the world’s most savage and repressive. Trump can barely contain his admiration and affection for Saudi despots, the Egyptian military junta, the royal oligarchical autocrats of the UAE and Qatar, the merciless dictators of Uganda and Rwanda.

The U.S. does not merely work with such dictatorships where they find them. The U.S. helps install them (as it did in Brazil in 1964 and dozens of other countries). Or, at the very least, the U.S. lavishes repressive regimes with multi-pronged support to maintain their grip on power in exchange for subservience.

Unlike Trump, President Barack Obama liked to pretend that his invasions and bombing campaigns were driven by a desire to bring freedom to people. Yet one need only look at the bloodbaths and repression that gripped Libya after Obama bombed its leader Muammar Gaddafi out of office, or the destruction in Syria that came from Obama’s CIA “regime change” war there, to see how fraudulent such claims are.

Despite decades of proof about U.S. intentions, many in the U.S. and throughout the democratic world are always eager to believe that the latest American bombing campaign is the good and noble one, that this one is the one that we can actually feel good about. 

Such a reaction is understandable: we want heroes and crave uplifting narratives about vanquishing tyrants and liberating people from repression. Hollywood films target such tribalistic and instinctive desires and so does western war propaganda. 

Believing that this is what is happening provides a sense of vicarious strength and purpose. One feels good believing in these happy endings. But that is not what Americans wars,  bombing campaigns and regime-change operations are designed to produce, and that it why they do not produce such outcomes.
 
 

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do.